She makes it look so easy, this young, lithe, blonde woman from England.

We watch her crunching through the thorny branches and gnarling brush, scaling rocky paths, adorned in cargo shorts and short sleeves, completely oblivious to the billions of insects and snakes, many poisonous, that surround her. Amazing.

We learn that unlike more experienced and professional explorers, Jane came with just a tent, some tin plates, an old pair of binoculars and an African cook named Dominic.

For long passages in the beginning of this astonishing film, Jane is seen in the frames of her first cinematographer, her mother, who blends English home movies with the jungles of Gombe Stream National Park.

“Jane” is a documentary that soon, magically, becomes a movie threaded with the music of oboes and violins, blending with the night screams of insects, stunning wild birds and the chatter and howls of chimpanzees; one becomes lost in it.

And oh, yes, those chimpanzees, the stars of the show, the featured players, the hairy, captivating little “munchkins” cavorting in their own green land of Oz. This is their movie, Jane is their “Dorothy.”

It’s easy to imagine that this is Grace Kelly on location in Tanzania, only inches from her comfy trailer, being attended to by grips and personal aides. We might easily expect to see Stewart Granger or Clark Gable step out of the brush and pull her into their arms.

But no stars appear. This is Jane Goodall, the real Jane Goodall, the 26-year-old secretary who was discovered by the legendary paleontologist Louis Leakey, in his search for a “pure soul,” unhindered by experience, to walk into the wilds of Tanzania, exposing herself to danger, and sit still in the depths of the wild green and simply watch chimpanzees in their daily lives, and watch she did.

It was Jane’s mission, should she accept, to extend Leakey’s famous behavioral study of great apes, and perhaps find that elusive and mysterious connection to early man.

Today, years later, we’ve been blessed with hours of incredible footage, shot in breathtaking 16 mm color and natural sound, all because of a grant from the National Geographic Society, which insisted on sending a cameraman to join Jane in the wild, the well respected Dutch nature filmmaker Hugo Baron van Lawick.

Up to then, only Jane’s mother and a few natives who volunteered to tag along in the wilderness were her daughter’s companions.

Jane reluctantly accepted the NGS’s cameraman, and after a bit, love entered the picture.

Hugo adds snips of personal moments into the film, his proposal of marriage in a short telegram back from England, and her replies.

It’s astonishing that van Lawick’s trove of the 1960’s footage, over 140 hours of gorgeous 16mm scenes of Jane’s life among the chimpanzees, got lost in the gray basements of the National Geographic Society, only to emerge years later in 2014, when the natural wilds of the world are being ravaged and forever lost.

It was van Lawick’s camera that brought Goodall into the universal eye and made her famous.

And thanks to director Brett Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) who took his own cinematographer, the Oscar nominated and Emmy winning Ellen Kuras, to Tanzania to shoot a 48-hour interview with the now octogenarian star of this wonderful documentary.

It’s in “Jane” that we meet this marvelous legendary woman, beautifully aged like a fine wine, full of joy and good humor.

Jane and Hugo raised a successful, handsome son “Grub,” but eventually divorced, yet remained friends and co-workers until Hugo’s death.

And here’s a lovely coda for you, little Jane Goodall of the English countryside, who as a child read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel “Tarzan of the Apes” and the fictional Jane, grew to become Dame Jane Morris Goodall, DBE, formerly Baroness Jane Van Lawick-Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and “Roots & Shoots” program that continues her work.

The emerald green forest of her youth is mostly gone now, but the yellow brick road she laid down has led generations of Janes to finish her work.

J.P. Devine, of Waterville, is a former stage and film actor.

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